Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/332

318 never digest the hard, knobby seeds, so conspicuous in the blackberry, the currant, and the grape. Southern fruits, on the contrary, are mainly eaten by parrots, monkeys, and other large fruit feeders, for whose attraction the plants specially lay themselves out. Hence the southern types desire to keep off unauthorized small intruders, which would merely pick holes in their pulp without doing any real good to the plant, as wasps do with our northern peaches. For this purpose, natural selection has favored in their case the development of various abstruse devices for keeping off the smaller birds and animals. Sometimes, as with the orange, lemon, and citron, the outer rind is bitter and nasty; sometimes, as with the cashew, it is violently pungent, acrid, and irritating; sometimes, as with the pomegranate, it is merely hard, stiff', and leathery. But, in all instances alike, it is meant to repel by every means in the plant's power the small intruder. Monkeys and parrots, however, the friends of the species, do not mind these slight outer defenses; they strip them off easily with hand or beak, and reach the sweet pulp within, duly intended by the grateful tree for their edification. On the other hand, the actual seed itself in tropical fruits is always thoroughly well protected against their teeth or bills, either by a very hard stone, as in the olive, date, and mango, or by intense bitterness, as in the orange and lemon.

It is to this specially defended tropical type of fruits that the true bottle-gourd essentially belongs. Our little English bryony has a mere northern bird-berry, round, and red, and soft, and almost rindless; it has adapted itself in this matter to the small ways of robins and finches. But the gourd has a hard and forbidding rind; it fastens itself up in a firm covering; it lays itself out with all its soul for the larger fruit-eaters of tropical forests. Not, indeed, that in its raw ripe state the gourd is by any means so dry and hard as in the arid form which we see in southern wine-shops. The method of preparing gourds for use as bottles is, indeed, a sufficiently lengthy one. You pick your fruit and hang it up to dry, not in the sun, but under the shade of the roof, for a whole year before it is fit for boring. As soon as it has hardened evenly all over, you cut a round hole at the stalk-end (at least in the common double-bulging form employed as a flask by southern shepherds) and rattle out the dry seeds and pulp, which easily come out of themselves through the opening. The remaining husk is hard enough and thick enough to bear carving. I have several gourds in my little collection thus carved in deep relief with Moorish patterns, including one which bears on its face, four times repeated, a text from the Koran.

Gourds, calabashes, and the shells of cocoanuts, together with human skulls and the horns of cattle, sheep, and antelopes, seem